The all-purpose G-word, as slogan and euphemism, needs taking
apart. Fredric Jameson dismantles its different components—technological,
political, cultural, economic and social—and reassembles them into a coherent
target for collective resistance.

FREDRIC JAMESON

GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL
STRATEGY

Attempts to define globalization often seem little better than
so many ideological appropriations—discussions not of the process itself, but
of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature;
while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without
relating them to each other.
[1]
See, for a sampling of views, Masao Myoshi and Fredric Jameson, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, Durham 1998. It may be more productive, then, to
combine all the descriptions and to take an inventory of their
ambiguities—something that means talking as much about fantasies and anxieties
as about the thing itself. In what follows we will explore these five distinct
levels of globalization, with a view to demonstrating their ultimate cohesion
and to articulating a politics of resistance: the technological, the political,
the cultural, the economic, the social, very much in that order.

I

One can talk about globalization, for instance, in purely
technological terms: the new communications technology and the information
revolution—innovations which, of course, do not simply remain at the level of
communication in the narrow sense, but also have their impact on industrial
production and organization, and on the marketing of goods. Most commentators
seem to feel that this dimension of globalization, at least, is irreversible: a
Luddite politics does not seem to be an option here. But the theme reminds us
of an urgent consideration in any discussion of globalization: is it really
inevitable? Can its processes be stopped, diverted or reversed? Might regions,
even whole continents, exclude the forces of globalization, secede, or ‘delink’
from it?
[2]
The allusion is to Samir Amin’s useful term, la déconnexion; see Delinking, London 1985. Our
answers to these questions will have an important bearing on our strategic
conclusions.

II

In discussions of globalization at the political level, one
question has predominated: that of the nation-state. Is it over and done with,
or does it still have a vital role to play? If reports of its demise are naïve,
what then to make of globalization itself? Should it, perhaps, be understood as
merely one pressure among many on national governments—and so on. But lurking
behind these debates, I believe, is a deeper fear, a more fundamental narrative
thought or fantasy. For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of
globalization, aren’t we really referring to the spreading economic and
military might of the US? And in speaking of the weakening of the nation-state,
are we not actually describing the subordination of the other nation-states to
American power, either through consent and collaboration, or by the use of
brute force and economic threat? Looming behind the anxieties expressed here is
a new version of what used to be called imperialism, which we can now trace
through a whole dynasty of forms. An earlier version was that of the pre-First
World War colonialist order, practised by a number of European countries, the
US and Japan; this was replaced after the Second World War and the subsequent
wave of decolonization by a Cold War form, less obvious but no less insidious
in its use of economic pressure and blackmail (‘advisers’; covert putsches such
as those in Guatemala and Iran), now led predominantly by the US but still
involving a few Western European powers.

Now perhaps we have a third stage, in which the United States
pursues what Samuel Huntington has defined as a three-pronged strategy: nuclear
weapons for the US alone; human rights and American-style electoral democracy;
and (less obviously) limits to immigration and the free flow of labour.
[3]
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, New York 1998. One might add a fourth crucial policy here: the propagation
of the free market across the globe. This latest form of imperialism will
involve only the US (and such utterly subordinated satellites as the UK), who
will adopt the role of the world’s policemen, and enforce their rule through
selected interventions (mostly bombings, from a great height) in various
alleged danger zones.

What kind of national autonomy do the other nations lose under
this new world order? Is this really the same kind of domination as
colonization, or forcible enlistment in the Cold War? There are some powerful
answers to this question, which mostly seem to fall under our next two
headings, the cultural and the economic. Yet the most frequent themes of
collective dignity and self-respect lead in fact less often to social than to
political considerations. So it is that, after the nation-state and
imperialism, we arrive at a third ticklish subject—nationalism.

But is not nationalism rather a cultural question? Imperialism
has certainly been discussed in such terms. And nationalism, as a whole
internal political programme, usually appeals not to financial self-interest,
or the lust for power, or even scientific pride—although these may be
side-benefits—but rather to something which is not technological, nor really
political or economic; and which we therefore, for want of a better word, tend
to call ‘cultural’. So is it always nationalist to resist US globalization? The
US thinks it is, and wants you to agree; and, moreover, to consider US
interests as being universal ones. Or is this simply a struggle between various
nationalisms, with US global interests merely representing the American kind?
We’ll come back to this in more detail later on.

III

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or
traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American
television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as
the very heart of globalization. And this fear that US models are replacing
everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two
remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of
economic domination—of local cultural industries closed down by American
rivals. At a deeper level, the anxiety becomes a social one, of which the
cultural is merely a symptom: the fear, in other words, that specifically
ethno-national ways of life will themselves be destroyed.

But before moving on to these economic and social considerations
we should look a little more closely at some responses to those cultural fears.
Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism—in that sense, playing
the game of US interests—by reassuring us that the global success of American
mass culture is not as bad as all that. Against it, they would assert, for
example, an Indian (or a Hindu?) identity, which will stubbornly resist the
power of an Anglo-Saxon imported culture, whose effects remain merely
superficial. There may even be an intrinsic European culture, which can never
really be Americanized; and so forth. What is never clear is whether this as it
were ‘natural’ defence against cultural imperialism requires overt acts of
resistance, a cultural-political programme.

Is it the case that in casting doubt upon the defensive strength
of these various, non-American cultures, one is offending or insulting them?
That one is implying that Indian culture, for instance, is too feeble to resist
the forces of the West? Would it not then be more appropriate to downplay the
power of imperialism on the grounds that to overemphasize it is to demean those
whom it menaces? This particular reflex of political correctness raises an
interesting representational issue, about which the following remark may
briefly be made.

All cultural politics necessarily confronts this rhetorical
alternation between an overweening pride in the affirmation of the cultural
group’s strength, and a strategic demeaning of it: and this for political
reasons. For such a politics can foreground the heroic, and embody forth
stirring images of the heroism of the subaltern—strong women, black heroes,
Fanonian resistance of the colonized—in order to encourage the public in
question; or it can insist on that group’s miseries, the oppression of women,
or of black people, or the colonized. These portrayals of suffering may be
necessary—to arouse indignation, to make the situation of the oppressed more
widely known, even to convert sections of the ruling class to their cause. But
the risk is that the more you insist on this misery and powerlessness, the more
its subjects come to seem like weak and passive victims, easily dominated, in
what can then be taken as offensive images that can even be said to disempower
those they concern. Both these strategies of representation are necessary in
political art, and they are not reconcilable. Perhaps they correspond to
different historical moments in the struggle, and evolving local opportunities
and representational needs. But it is impossible to resolve this particular
antinomy of political correctness unless one thinks about them in that
political and strategic way.

IV

I have argued that these cultural issues tend to spill over into
economic and social ones. Let’s look first at the economic dimension of
globalization, which, in fact, constantly seems to be dissolving into all the
rest: controlling the new technologies, reinforcing geopolitical interests and,
with postmodernity, finally collapsing the cultural into the economic—and the
economic into the cultural. Commodity production is now a cultural phenomenon,
in which you buy the product fully as much for its image as for its immediate
use. An entire industry has come into being to design commodities’ images and
to strategize their sale: advertising has become a fundamental mediation
between culture and economics, and it is surely to be numbered among the myriad
forms of aesthetic production (however much its existence may problematize our
idea of this). Erotization is a significant part of the process: the
advertising strategists are true Freudo-Marxists who understand the necessity
of libidinal investment to enhance their wares. Seriality also plays a role:
other people’s images of the car or the lawnmower will inform my own decision
to get one (allowing us to glimpse the cultural and the economic folding back
into the social itself). Economics has in this sense become a cultural matter;
and perhaps we may speculate that in the great financial markets, too, a
cultural image accompanies the firm whose stocks we dump or buy. Guy Debord
long ago described ours as a society of images, consumed aesthetically. He
thereby designated this seam that separates culture from economics and, at the
same time, connects the two. We talk a good deal—loosely—about the
commodification of politics, or ideas, or even emotions and private life; what
we must now add is that that commodification today is also an
aestheticization—that the commodity, too, is now ‘aesthetically’ consumed.

Such is the movement from economics to culture; but there is
also a no less significant movement from culture to economics. This is the
entertainment business itself, one of the greatest and most profitable exports
of the United States (along with weapons and food). We have already looked at
the problems of opposing cultural imperialism solely in terms of local tastes
and identities—of the ‘natural’ resistance of an Indian or an Arab public, for
example, to certain kinds of Hollywood fare. In fact, it is all too easy to
acquaint a non-American public with a taste for Hollywood styles of violence
and bodily immediacy, its prestige only enhanced by some image of US modernity
and even postmodernity.
[4]
I have made an approach to such an analysis in The Cultural Turn, London 1999; and see also chapter 8 of Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991. Is this, then, an argument for the universality of the
West—or, at least, of the United States—and its ‘civilization’? It is a
position which is surely widely, if unconsciously, held, and deserves to be
confronted seriously and philosophically, even if it seems preposterous.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the
Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets—an
achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various
treaties and aid packages. In most of the European countries—France stands out
in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism—the
national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such
binding agreements. This systematic US attempt to batter down ‘cultural
protectionist’ policies is only part of a more general and increasingly global
corporate strategy, now enshrined in the WTO and its efforts—such as the
abortive MAI project—to supercede local laws with international statutes that
favour American corporations, whether in intellectual property copyrights,
patents (of, for example, rainforest materials or local inventions), or in the
deliberate undermining of national self-sufficiency in food.

Here, culture has become decidedly economic, and this particular
economics clearly sets a political agenda, dictating policy. Struggles for raw
materials and other resources—oil and diamonds, say—are, of course, still waged
in the world: dare one call these ‘modernist’ forms of imperialism, along with
the even older, more purely political, diplomatic or military efforts to
substitute friendly (that is, subservient) governments for resistant ones? But
it would seem that today the more distinctively postmodern form of
imperialism—even of cultural imperialism—is the one I have been describing,
working through the projects of NAFTA, GATT, MAI and the WTO; not least because
these forms offer a textbook example (from a new textbook!) of that
dedifferentiation, that confluence between the various and distinct levels of
the economic, the cultural and the political, that characterizes postmodernity
and lends a fundamental structure to globalization.

There are several other aspects of globalization’s economic
dimension which we should briefly review. Transnational corporations—simply
‘multinationals’ in the 1970s—were the first sign and symptom of the new
capitalist development, raising political fears about the possibility of a new
kind of dual power, of the preponderance of these supranational giants over
national governments. The paranoid side of such fears and fantasies may be
allayed by the complicity of the states themselves with these business
operations, given the revolving door between the two sectors—especially in
terms of US government personnel. (Ironically, free market rhetoricians have
always denounced the Japanese model of government intervention in national
industry.) The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is
their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their
operations to cheaper locations overseas. There has as yet been no comparable
globalization of the labour movement to respond to this; the movement of
Gastarbeiter representing a social and cultural mobility, perhaps, but
not yet a political one.

The huge expansion of finance capital markets has been a
spectacular feature of the new economic landscape—once again, its very
possibility linked to the simultaneities opened up by the new technologies.
Here we no longer have to do with movements of labour or industrial capacity
but rather with that of capital itself. The destructive speculation on foreign
currencies seen over recent years signals a graver development, namely the
absolute dependency of nation-states outside the First World core on foreign
capital, in the form of loans, supports and investments. (Even First World
countries are vulnerable: witness the pounding received by France for its more
leftist policies during the initial years of Mitterand’s regime.) And whereas
the processes that have eroded many countries’ self-sufficiency in agriculture,
leading to import-dependency on US food-stuffs, might, conceivably, be
described as a new worldwide division of labour, constituting, as in Adam
Smith, an enhancement of productivity, the same cannot be said of dependency on
the new global finance markets. The spate of financial crises over the last
five years, and the public statements by political leaders such as Prime
Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, and economic figures such as George Soros, have
given stark visibility to this destructive side of the new world economic
order, in which instant transfers of capital can threaten to impoverish whole
regions, draining overnight the accumulated value of years of national labour.

The United States has resisted the strategy of introducing
controls on the international transfers of capital—one method by which some of
this financial and speculative damage might presumably be contained; and it
has, of course, played a leading role within the IMF itself, long perceived to
be the driving force of neo-liberal attempts to impose free-market conditions
on other countries by threatening to withdraw investment funds. In recent
years, however, it has no longer been so clear that the interests of the
financial markets and those of the United States are absolutely identical: the
anxiety exists that these new global financial markets may yet—like the
sentient machinery of recent science fiction—mutate into autonomous mechanisms
which produce disasters no one wants, and spin beyond the control of even the
most powerful government.

V

One further dimension of economic globalization, that of the
so-called ‘culture of consumption’—developed initially in the US and other
First World countries but now systematically purveyed all round the
world—brings us, finally, to the social sphere. This term has been used by the
Scottish sociologist Leslie Sklair to describe a specific mode of life,
generated by late-capitalist commodity production, that threatens to consume
alternative forms of everyday behaviour in other cultures—and which may, in
turn, be targeted for specific kinds of resistance.
[6]
See Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, Baltimore 1991. It seems to me more useful, however, to examine this phenomenon not in
cultural terms as such but rather at the point at which the economic passes
over into the social, since, as part of daily life, the ‘culture of
consumption’ is in fact a part and parcel of the social fabric and can scarcely
be separated from it.

But perhaps the question is not so much whether the ‘culture of
consumption’ is part of the social as whether it signals the end of
all that we have hitherto understood the social to be. Here the argument
connects to older denunciations of individualism and the atomization of
society, corroding traditional social groups. Gesellschaft versus
Gemeinschaft: impersonal modern society undermining older families and
clans, villages, ‘organic’ forms. The argument, then, might be that consumption
itself individualizes and atomizes, that its logic tears through what is so
often metaphorized as the fabric of daily life. (And indeed daily life, the
everyday or the quotidian, does not begin to be theoretically and
philosophically, sociologically, conceptualized until the very moment when it
begins to be destroyed in this fashion.) The critique of commodity consumption
here parallels the traditional critique of money itself—where gold is
identified as the supremely corrosive element, gnawing at social bonds.

He adds another ironic dialectical twist: the socially
destructive force of Thatcher’s free-market experiment not only produced a
backlash among those whom it impoverished; it also succeeded in atomizing the
‘popular front’ of Conservative groups who had supported her programme and been
her electoral base. Gray draws two conclusions from this reversal: the first is
that true cultural conservatism (to wit, his own) is incompatible with the
interventionism of free-market policies; the second, that democracy is itself
incompatible with this last, since the great majority of people must
necessarily resist its impoverishing and destructive consequences—always
provided that they can recognize them, and have the electoral means to do so.

We should stress here that the neo-liberal ideology which Gray
sees as powering free-market globalization is a specifically American
phenomenon. (Thatcher may have put it into practice but, as we have seen, she
destroyed herself and, perhaps, British free-market neo-liberalism in the
process.) Gray’s point is that the US doctrine—reinforced by American
‘universalism’, under the rubric of ‘Western civilization’—is not shared
anywhere else in the world. At a time when the reproach of ‘Eurocentrism’ is
still popular, he reminds us that the traditions of continental Europe have not
always been hospitable to such absolute free-market values but have rather
tended towards what he calls the ‘social market’—in other words, the Welfare
State and social democracy. Neither are the cultures of Japan and China,
Southeast Asia and Russia, innately hospitable to the neo-liberal agenda,
although it may succeed in ravaging them as well.

At this point, Gray falls back on two standard and in my opinion
highly questionable social-science axioms: that of cultural tradition, and
that—not mentioned yet—of modernity itself. And here a parenthetical excursus
on another influential work on the global situation today may be useful. In
The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington, too, emerges—if perhaps
for all the wrong reasons—as a fervent opponent of US claims to universalism
and, in particular, of America’s current policy (or habit?) of police-style
military interventions across the globe. In part, this is because he is a new
kind of isolationist; in part, it is because he believes that what we may think
of as universal Western values, applicable everywhere—electoral democracy, the
rule of law, human rights—are not in fact rooted in some eternal human nature,
but are, rather, culturally specific, the expression of one particular
constellation of values—American ones—among many others.

Huntington’s rather Toynbee-like vision posits eight currently
existing world cultures: the West’s, of course; the culture of Russian Orthodox
Christianity; those of Islam, of Hinduism, of Japan—limited to those islands,
but very distinctive; and the Chinese or Confucian tradition; finally, with
some conceptual embarrassment, throwing in a putative African culture, together
with some characteristic synthesis or other that we may expect to see emerging
as a Latin American one. Huntington’s method here is reminiscent of the
earliest days of anthropological theory: social phenomena—structures, behaviour
and the like—are characterized as ‘cultural traditions’, which are in turn
‘explained’ by their origin in a specific religion—this latter, as prime mover,
needing no further historical or sociological explanation. One might think that
the conceptual embarrassment posed by secular societies would give Huntington
pause. Not at all: for something called ‘values’ apparently survives the
secularization process, and explains why Russians are still different from
Chinese, and both of these from present-day North Americans or Europeans. (The
latter are lumped together here under ‘Western civilization’, whose ‘values’,
of course, are called Christian—in the sense of some putative, Western
Christianity, sharply distinguished from Orthodox Christianity, but also
potentially distinguishable from the residual Mediterranean Catholicism
expected to materialize in Huntington’s ‘Latin-American’ brand.)

Huntington does remark in passing that Max Weber’s thesis of the
Protestant work ethic would seem to identify capitalism with a specific
religious-cultural tradition; apart from this, however, the word ‘capitalism’
scarcely appears. Indeed, one of the most astonishing features of this
apparently antagonistic world survey of the globalization process is the utter
absence of any serious economics. This is truly political science of the most
arid and specialized type, all diplomatic and military clashes, without a hint
of the unique dynamics of the economic that makes for the originality of
historiography since Marx. In Gray’s work, after all, the insistence on a
variety of cultural traditions was noteworthy for the delineation of the
various kinds of capitalism they could produce or accommodate; here the
plurality of cultures simply stands for the decentralized, diplomatic and
military jungle with which ‘Western’ or ‘Christian’ culture will have to deal.
Yet ultimately, any discussion of globalization surely has to come to terms,
one way or another, with the reality of capitalism itself.

Closing our parenthesis on Huntington and his religious wars,
let us return to Gray, who also talks about cultures and cultural traditions,
but here rather in terms of their capacities to furnish forth different forms
of modernity. ‘The growth of the world economy,’ writes Gray,

does not inaugurate a universal civilization, as both Smith and
Marx thought it must. Instead it allows the growth of indigenous kinds of
capitalism, diverging from the ideal free market and from each other. It
creates regimes that achieve modernity by renewing their own cultural
traditions, not by imitating western countries. There are many modernities, and
as many ways of failing to be modern.

Significantly, all of these so-called ‘modernities’—the kinship
capitalism that Gray traces within the Chinese diaspora, the samurai capitalism
in Japan, chaebol in Korea, the ‘social market’ in Europe and even Russia’s
current mafia-style anarcho-capitalism—all presuppose specific, and
pre-existing, forms of social organization, based on the order of the
family—whether as clan, extended network, or in the more conventional sense. In
this respect, Gray’s account of the resistance to the global free market is
finally not cultural, despite his repeated use of the word, but ultimately
social in nature: the various ‘cultures’ are crucially characterized as able to
draw upon distinct kinds of social resources—collectives, communities, familial
relationships—over and against what the free market brings.

In Gray, the grimmest dystopia lies in the United States itself:
drastic social polarization and immiseration, the destruction of the middle
classes, large-scale structural unemployment without any welfare safety net,
one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, devastated cities,
disintegrating families—such are the prospects of any society lured towards an
absolute free market. Unlike Huntington, Gray is not obliged to look for some
distinct cultural tradition under which to classify American social realities:
they spring rather from the atomization and destruction of the social, leaving
United States a terrible object lesson for the rest of the world.

‘There are many modernities’: Gray, as we have seen, celebrates
‘regimes that achieve modernity by renewing their own cultural traditions’. How
is one to understand this word, modernity, exactly? And what accounts for its
prodigious fortunes today, in the midst, after all, of what many call
‘postmodernity’, and after the end of the Cold War, and the discrediting of
both Western and Communist versions of ‘modernization’—that is to say, of the
local development and export of heavy industry?

There has certainly been a recrudescence of the vocabulary of
modernity—or, perhaps better, of modernization—all over the world. Does it mean
modern technology? In that case, nearly every country in the world has surely
long since been modernized, and has cars, telephones, aeroplanes, factories,
even computers and local stock markets. Does being insufficiently modern—here
generally implying backward, rather than properly pre-modern—simply mean not
having enough of these? Or failing to run them efficiently? Or does being
modern mean having a constitution and laws, or living the way people in
Hollywood movies do?

Without stopping too long here, I would hazard the notion that
‘modernity’ is something of a suspect word in this context, being used
precisely to cover up the absence of any great collective social hope, or
telos, after the discrediting of socialism. For capitalism itself has no social
goals. To brandish the word ‘modernity’ in place of ‘capitalism’ allows
politicians, governments and political scientists to pretend that it does, and
so to paper over that terrifying absence. It betokens a fundamental limitation
in Gray’s thought that he is forced to use the word at so many strategic
moments.

Gray’s own programme for the future emphatically disdains any
return to the collective projects of old: globalization in the current sense is
irreversible, he repeats over and over again. Communism was evil (just like its
mirror image, the utopia of the free market). Social democracy is pronounced
unviable today: the social democratic regime ‘presupposed a closed economy . .
. Many of [its] core policies cannot be sustained in open economies’ where
‘they will be rendered unworkable by the freedom of capital to migrate’.
Instead, countries will have to try to alleviate the rigours of the free market
by fidelity to their own ‘cultural traditions’: and global schemes of
regulation must somehow be devised. The whole aproach is very much dependent on
discursive struggle—that is to say, on breaking the hegemonic power of
neo-liberal ideology. Gray has remarkable things to say about the sway of false
consciousness in the US, which apparently only a great economic crisis can
shatter (he is convinced that one will come). Markets cannot be
self-regulating, whether global or not; yet ‘without a fundamental shift in the
policies of the United States all proposals for reform of global markets will
be stillborn’. It is a bleak yet realistic picture.

As for the causes: Gray attributes both the preconditions of the
global free market and its irreversibility not to ideology, as such, but to
technology; and with this, we arrive back at our starting point. In his view,
‘The decisive advantage that a multinational company achieves over its rivals
comes finally from its capacity to generate new technologies and to deploy them
effectively and profitably’. Meanwhile, ‘the root cause of falling wages and
rising unemployment is the worldwide spread of new technology’. Technology
determines social and economic policy—‘New technologies make full employment
politics of the traditional sort unworkable’. And finally: ‘A truly global
economy is being created by the worldwide spread of new technologies, not by
the spread of free markets’; ‘the main motor of this process [of globalization]
is the rapid diffusion of new, distance-abolishing information technologies’.
Gray’s technological determinism, palliated by his hopes for multiple ‘cultural
traditions’ and politicized by his opposition to American neo-liberalism,
finally turns out to offer a theory fully as ambiguous as that of so many other
globalization theorists, doling out hope and anxiety in equal measure, while
adopting a ‘realist’ stance.

VII

Now I want to see whether the system of analysis we have just
worked out—disentangling the distinct levels of the technological, the
political, the cultural, the economic and the social (very much in that order);
and revealing in the process the interconnexions between them—may not also be
helpful in determining the shape of a politics capable of offering some
resistance to globalization, as we have articulated it. For it may be that to
approach political strategies in this same way might tell us which aspects of
globalization they isolate and target, and which they neglect.

The technological level could evoke, as we have seen, a Luddite
politics—the breaking of the new machines, the attempt to arrest, perhaps even
reverse the onset of a new technological age. Luddism has been notoriously
caricatured historically, and was by no means as thoughtless and ‘spontaneous’
a programme as it has been made out to be.
[9]
See Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future, Reading, MA 1995.
The real merit of evoking such a strategy, however, is the scepticism it
causes—awakening all our deepest held convictions about technological
irreversibility or, to put it another way, projecting for us the purely
systemic logic of its proliferation, perpetually escaping from national
controls (as witness the failure of the many government attempts to protect and
hoard technological innovation). The ecological critique might also find its
place here (although it has been suggested that the will to control industrial
abuse might offer a stimulus to technological innovation); as might various
proposals such as the Tobin plan to control capital flight and investment
across national borders.

It becomes crucially necessary here to distinguish between
nationalism as such and that anti-US imperialism—Gaullism, perhaps
[14]
This is not exactly his take on it, but see anyway Régis Debray’s wonderfully provocative and sympathetic A Demain de Gaulle, Paris 1990.—which must today be a part of any self-respecting
nationalism, if it is not to degenerate into this or that ‘ethnic conflict’.
The latter are border wars; resistance to US imperialism alone constitutes
opposition to the system, or to globalization itself. However, the areas best
equipped in socio-economic terms to sustain that kind of global
resistance—Japan, or the European Union—are themselves deeply implicated in the
US project of the global free market and have the usual ‘mixed feelings’,
defending their interests largely through disputes over tariffs, protection,
patents and other kinds of trade issues.

Finally, one has to add that the nation-state today remains the
only concrete terrain and framework for political struggle. The recent
anti-World Bank and anti-WTO demonstrations do seem to mark a promising new
departure for a politics of resistance to globalization within the US. Yet it
is hard to see how such struggles in other countries can be developed in any
other fashion than the ‘nationalist’—that is to say, Gaullist—spirit I have
evoked above: for example, in fighting for labour protection laws against the
global free-market push; in the resistance of national cultural ‘protectionist’
policies, or the defence of patent law, against an American ‘universalism’ that
would sweep away local culture and pharmaceutical industries, along with
whatever welfare safety-net and socialized medical systems might still be in
place. Here, the defense of the national suddenly becomes the defense of the
welfare state itself.

Meanwhile, this important terrain of struggle faces a clever
political countermove, as the US coopts the language of national
self-protection, using it to mean the defense of American laws on child labour
and the environment against ‘international’ interference. This turns a national
resistance to neo-liberalism into a defence of America’s ‘human rights’
universalism, and thus empties this particular struggle of its anti-imperialist
content. In another twist, these struggles for sovereignty can be conflated
with Iraqi-style resistance—ie, interpreted as the struggle for the right to
produce atomic weapons (which another strand of US ‘universalism’ now restricts
to the ‘great powers’). In all these situations, we see the discursive struggle
between the claims of the particular and those of the universal—confirming
Chatterjee’s identification of the fundamental contradiction of the nationalist
position: the attempt to universalize a particularity. It should be understood
that this critique does not entail an endorsement of universalism, for in the
latter we have seen the United States in fact defending its own specific
national interest. The opposition between universal and particular is rather
embedded as a contradiction within the existing historical situation of
nation-states inside a global system. And this is, perhaps, the deeper,
philosophical reason why the struggle against globalization, though it may
partially be fought on national terrain, cannot be successfully prosecuted to a
conclusion in completely national or nationalist terms—even though nationalist
passion, in my Gaullist sense, may be an indispensable driving force.

What, then, of political resistance at the cultural level, which
includes in one way or another a defence of ‘our way of life’? This can be a
powerful negative programme: it ensures the articulation and foregrounding of
all the visible and invisible forms of cultural imperialism; it allows an enemy
to be identified, destructive forces to be seen. In the displacement of
national literature by international or American bestsellers, in the collapse
of a national film industry under the weight of Hollywood, of national
television flooded by US imports, in the closing down of local cafés and
restaurants as the fast-food giants move in, the deeper and more intangible
effects of globalization on daily life can first and most dramatically be seen.

But the problem is that the thus threatened ‘daily life’ itself
is far more difficult to represent: so that while its disaggregation can be
made visible and tangible, the positive substance of what is being defended
tends to reduce itself to anthropological tics and oddities, many of which can
be reduced to this or that religious tradition (and it is the very notion of
‘tradition’ that I wish to call into question here). This returns us to
something like a Huntingtonian world politics; with the proviso that the only
‘religion’ or ‘religious tradition’ which does seem to show the energy of a
resistance to globalization and Westernization (‘Westoxification’, the Iranians
call it) is—predictably enough—Islam. After the disappearance of the
international Communist movement it would seem that, on the world stage, only
certain currents within Islam—generally characterized as
‘fundamentalist’—really position themselves in programmatic opposition to
Western culture, or certainly to Western ‘cultural imperialism’.

It is equally obvious, however, that these forces can no longer
constitute, as Islam may have done in its earliest days, a genuinely
universalistic opposition; a weakness that becomes even clearer if we pass from
the domain of culture to that of economics itself. If it is, in reality,
capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of
globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform
this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms
of resistance to the West. The critique of usury will clearly not be of much
help unless it is extrapolated, in Ali Shariati’s fashion, into a thoroughgoing
repudiation of finance capitalism as such; while the traditional Islamic
denunciations of the exploitation of local mineral wealth and of local labour
by multinational corporations still position us within the limits of an older,
anti-imperialist nationalism, ill-equipped to match the tremendous invasive
force of the new, globalized capital, transformed beyond all recognition from
what it was forty years ago.

Combination, the old word for labour organization,
offers an excellent symbolic designation for what is at issue on this ultimate,
social level; and the history of the labour movement everywhere gives
innumerable examples of the forging of new forms of solidarity in active
political work. Nor are such collectivities always at the mercy of new
technologies: on the contrary, the electronic exchange of information seems to
have been central where ever new forms of political resistance to globalization
(the demonstrations against the WTO, for example) have begun to appear. For the
moment, we can use the word ‘utopian’ to designate whatever programmes and
representations express, in however distorted or unconscious a fashion, the
demands of a collective life to come, and identify social collectivity as the
crucial centre of any truly progressive and innovative political response to
globalization.

[1] See, for a sampling of views, Masao Myoshi and Fredric Jameson, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, Durham 1998.

[2] The allusion is to Samir Amin’s useful term, la déconnexion; see Delinking, London 1985.

[4] I have made an approach to such an analysis in The Cultural Turn, London 1999; and see also chapter 8 of Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991.

[5] I have taken the unpopular position that the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union was due, not to the failure of socialism, but to the abandonment of delinking by the Socialist bloc. See ‘Actually Existing Marxism’ in C. Casarino, Rebecca Karl, Xudong Zhang, and S. Makdisi, eds, Marxism Beyond Marxism?, Polygraph 6/7 1993. This intuition is authoritatively confirmed by Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, London 1994.

[7] John Gray, False Dawn, New York 1998. It should be noted that his official target is not globalization as such, which he regards as technological and inevitable, but rather what he calls the ‘Utopia of the global free market’. Gray is an admittedly anti-Enlightenment thinker for whom all utopias (communism as well as neo-liberalism) are evil and destructive; what some ‘good’ globalization would look like, however, he does not say.

[8] See, on this and the general lessons of the Thatcherite strategy, Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London 1988.

[10] It is no accident that when one tries to imagine delinking in this way it is always the technology of the media that is at stake, reinforcing the very old view that the word ‘media’ designates not only communication but transportation as well.

[11] The words ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ have always been ambiguous, misleading, perhaps even dangerous. The positive or ‘good’ nationalism I have in mind involves what Henri Lefebvre liked to call ‘the great collective project’, and takes the form of the attempt to construct a nation. Nationalisms that have come to power have therefore mainly been the ‘bad’ ones. Perhaps Samir Amin’s distinction between the state and the nation, between the seizure of state power and the construction of the nation, is the relevant one here (Delinking, p. 10). State power is thus the ‘bad’ aim of ‘national bourgeois hegemony’, while the construction of the nation must finally mobilize the people in just such a ‘great collective project’. Meanwhile, I believe it is misleading to confound nationalism with phenomena like communalism, which strikes me rather as a kind of (for example) Hindu identity politics, albeit on a vast and, indeed, ‘national’ scale.

[13] Cuba and China might be the richest counter-examples of the way in which a concrete nationalism could be completed by a socialist project.

[14] This is not exactly his take on it, but see anyway Régis Debray’s wonderfully provocative and sympathetic A Demain de Gaulle, Paris 1990.

[15] Eric Wolf’s classic Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, London 1971, is still instructive in this regard.

[16] Anyone who evokes the ultimate value of the community or the collectivity from a left perspective must face three problems: 1) how to distinguish this position radically from communitarianism; 2) how to differentiate the collective project from fascism or nazism; 3) how to relate the social and the economic level—that is, how to use the Marxist analysis of capitalism to demonstrate the unviability of social solutions within that system. As for collective identities, in a historical moment in which individual personal identity has been unmasked as a decentered locus of multiple subject positions, surely it is not too much to ask that something analogous be conceptualized on the collective level.